


underneath the wrapping

by triggeringthehealing (froggydarren)



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon, Sheriff Stilinski's Name is John, mention of Hale house fire, pack Secret Santa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-27
Updated: 2015-12-27
Packaged: 2018-05-09 18:23:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5550680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/froggydarren/pseuds/triggeringthehealing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles’ name stared at Derek from the slip of paper that he opened begrudgingly, and he almost dropped it in surprise. Out of all the people in the pack, only Lydia would’ve been worse to shop for, though not for the same reason that Derek is frustrated with his giftee.</p>
            </blockquote>





	underneath the wrapping

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Labyrinthinee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Labyrinthinee/gifts).



> This fic is a gift from the Sterek Secret Santa 2015 exchange for [Bea](http://serendipitee.tumblr.com/). Happy holidays, dear!
> 
> Now also with photoset [here](http://triggeringthehealing.tumblr.com/post/136042224414/underneath-the-wrapping-sterek-g-ao3-23k).

There was no tradition of doing a Secret Santa exchange in the pack, but because it was the first winter with all of them back in Beacon Hills again, someone — and Derek has no idea which one ofthem suggested it — decided that it was _the_ way to go about Christmas. There was a vote, he remembers, and he was woefully beaten, the only one to show hesitation over the plan to gather at the loft for the presents exchange. 

Everyone’s name was put into the hat that went around during that pack meeting, including the Sheriff and Melissa, and even Lydia’s Mom, who was in on the supernatural shenanigans by then. Or always had been, Derek’s unclear on how much she knew how soon, but since the Nemeton’s balance has been restored, it didn’t matter. 

Cora is back, too, and when Derek reached into the hat, he hoped it would be her name he’d draw, because out of all the pack members, his sister was the easiest to shop for, at least for him. They’d bonded during a trip that he took to visit the pack that raised her, and they are close now, her expectations of him as an Alpha long gone, replaced by a family bond they’d both been missing. When his hand emerged from the hat, he realised that hoping for that much luck was way too optimistic, even if he was a lot more positive about life than he used to be. 

Stiles’ name stared at Derek from the slip of paper that he opened begrudgingly, and he almost dropped it in surprise. Out of all the people in the pack, only Lydia would’ve been worse to shop for, though not for the same reason that Derek is frustrated with his giftee. 

No, Lydia would’ve been almost impossible to buy presents for because the things he knows she’s wishing for are way out of most people’s budget range. And yes, the Sheriff, Melissa, and Natalie all insisted on a limit per present, because they knew their kids were barely out of college and mostly in entry level jobs. But that wouldn’t be a deterrent to some people’s demands, especially not to those used to a certain standard. Not that any of that is Derek’s problem, anyway.

He has spent a week staring at the piece of paper with Stiles’ name and debating what to do about it, not because he has no ideas, but because he only has _one_. An idea that won’t leave him alone, but one that he doesn’t think he can bring himself to do. He has a present for Stiles, but it terrifies him to even consider using it, because of what it might mean. Or, if he’s honest with himself, it’s what it most definitely would mean. 

Because it’s not every day that he’d give someone a piece of his childhood, a memento of times before the house he grew up in was burned to pieces or torn down. But that’s exactly what the present he’s been holding on to for years is: a Star Wars collectible, still boxed, and somehow miraculously barely touched by the flames. It’s not one of the ultra rare ones, but it’s one that Derek remembers from a garage sale years ago, one that his Dad — a huge Star Wars fan — got excited about, buying it with the expectation of it gaining more value. 

He almost forgot it existed, buried at the back of the vault. Or at least he tried to, though it’s crossed his mind every Christmas, and every year around Stiles’ birthday. He couldn’t bring himself to give Stiles something like that though, not openly like those presents would be. Now, with the gift exchange planned to be anonymous — Derek wonders if the pack will enforce that — there’s less of a chance that he’ll give away more than just the gift. There’s a chance that he could give Stiles the present without Stiles realising what it means. 

Ultimately, it comes to the fact that on Christmas Eve, when he wakes up in the morning, he still doesn’t have anything else to wrap up as a gift. So Derek digs out a gift bag, one with cartoon reindeer and candy canes, and he tosses the box inside, then covers it with tissue paper. By the time he gets to the loft, he can hear that most of the pack is already there, and there are Christmas carols playing from somewhere. 

“Hey Derek, you’re just in time,” Melissa greets him at the door, on her way out. “I’m just getting the cookies, and Scott will be here any minute, he got held up at work.” 

Derek nods, and she doesn’t wait for him to respond any further. She slips past him and towards the stairs, leaving him no option but to walk in, as the door is wide open and he can already see at least two heads turning in his direction. One of them is Isaac, who obviously heard Derek arrive, and the other is John, who was probably watching Melissa leave. Derek nods at them too, and walks towards the tree — he doesn’t know who went through the hassle of putting one up for what’s basically just a meeting spot, and not an occupied place — spotting the pile of presents underneath it. His gift bag is small, and he pushed it behind some others, hoping that no one is watching for the origins of the presents. 

Melissa comes back with Scott, holding the promised plate of cookies that she went to her car for, and everyone settles on the couches around the room. 

“Right, presents,” Stiles pipes up from a seat right next to the tree, and everyone else hums in agreement. “I’ll hand them out, and then we’ll all open them at the same time.”

“That was the deal, yes,” Lydia comments, and grabs the small box that Stiles is holding out to her.

While Stiles is passing out the presents, and looking for name tags on each of them, Derek settles into his spot, and tries to relax. He knows the wolves — he can see Cora and Isaac sniffing at the bags they’re holding — will try to figure out who their secret Santa was, but he’s less concerned about the humans. The parents don’t seem to have the drive to find that part out, and he has a suspicion that some of the pack members already know who they’re getting presents from. 

Not Stiles, though, he just looks at the gift bag with confusion when he sets it at his feet, like he can’t even begin to guess where it came from. Derek tries hard to shift his focus from Stiles, and only manages to do so when Stiles hands him a box, wrapped a little crookedly in paper that has generic holiday decorations on it. He pushes away the temptation to try and isolate any scents from it, and instead lets the mixed scent from the whole pack fill his nose. 

“Okay, everyone has got their gift?” Stiles asks, breaking the silence in the room. “No one was lame and didn’t fulfil their duty? Good, now it’s opening time!” 

The room fills with sounds of ripping paper and scrunched tissue, shortly followed by murmurs of appreciation and the occasional gasp over the contents of the packages. Until…

“Holy shit!”

Stiles’ voice brings everyone to a standstill, and Derek freezes, his thumb still under a layer of the wrapping paper his gift is in. 

“What even… holy crap, this is awesome!” 

There are waves of excitement rolling off of Stiles, and curiosity from the others. Derek doesn’t need to look up to know that at least Scott and Liam are moving over to look at what Stiles got, both of them already having opened theirs. He can’t look though, so he focuses back on opening his own present, knowing that he’s doing a bad job of hiding how much his attention is on Stiles. 

“Who even… man, this is so amazing, it must be worth a fortune,” Stiles keeps talking, though his voice is lower now, too quiet for anyone but the wolves in the room to hear. “There’s no way this fit into the budget. It does narrow down the possible list though,” he rambles on, and Derek freezes again. 

His fingers have uncovered a simple wooden box by now, and there’s a scent that hits him, distracting him from his panic over Stiles’ musings about his present and its source. But Derek’s mind reels as he looks down on the box in his hands, a familiar carving on the top of it, one that he’s seen too many times, on too many items. It’s the triskellion, the same one as his tattoo, and the medallion that Peter tried to use to anchor Derek way back when. 

Everything around Derek disappears in a haze, and he sees his fingers tremble when he reaches for the latch on the front. He lifts the lid, and the smell that it uncovers almost bowls him over. It’s the scent of _pack_ , but not the one he’s surrounded by. It’s his family, their scents unmistakably there, though muddled a little by smells that take Derek a while to recognise as ones similar to the Sheriff’s station. When the lid is up fully, the presence of the scents makes sense. 

Photos, the box is filled with photos, and there’s a little charring from the fire on the edge of the box, like it was licked by fire. They’re thrown in haphazardly, and none of the little rectangles seem harmed, almost as if there was a protecting spell on them. Derek wonders for a second if that’s a possibility, but he doesn’t dwell on it — he knows there were objects with protective enchantments on them in the house, he found a few of them before the house was torn down — because his brain is overloaded with the pictures he’s looking at. 

Carefully, he lifts a few out of the box, and they’re shaking in his hands. It’s only a secondary awareness that lets him know that Cora has slipped closer to him, and that there are people staring at them as he lifts the top photo — a shot of the house he grew up in — to reveal the ones underneath. 

He goes through them slowly, sometimes pausing because Cora puts a hand on his wrist to stop him, to look at some of them a few seconds longer. They’re memories, so many memories that Derek loses track of where he is, and lets his mind wander to when the photos were taken, and to the people in them. 

There is one that he stops at without Cora’s prompting, a photo taken in his old bedroom, when he was about thirteen. There are basketball posters on the walls, the room looks like the closet exploded all over it, and thirteen year old Derek is on his bed, headphones over his ears and holding — _oh shit_ — the very box that Stiles found in his gift bag. 

“Holy shit,” comes a whisper from behind Derek, and Cora’s hand disappears from his wrist. 

He knows that Stiles is behind him, just like he knows that everyone else has suddenly decided they have something important to do away from them. Derek can hear the steps towards the sliding door, others heading up the spiral staircase, and only one heartbeat remaining close to him. The one that he has memorised, the one that has been his anchor for longer than he’s willing to admit even to himself. 

“You,” Stiles breathes out, though Derek still hasn’t acknowledged that he’s aware of his surroundings. “You gave me a Star Wars figure I’ve been looking for everywhere. Because _you_ had it, and you just… gave it to me.” 

Derek can’t answer, he has no words to say, because he’s afraid that if he tried, there would be confessions that he doesn’t know if he’s ready for. Admissions that he is sure _Stiles_ wouldn’t want to hear. 

“Derek,” Stiles whispers, a lot closer than Derek expected him to be. 

When he turns, Stiles is behind the couch, his fingers digging into the cushion behind Derek’s head, his knuckles white. 

“Yeah,” Derek says, and it’s acknowledgement of Stiles’ presence as much as it is a confirmation of Stiles’ theory about his gift. 

“I can’t… Derek, I can’t accept that,” Stiles blurts out. “It’s too much, and it’s yours, and it’s something from before…” They both take a breath at that, but Stiles regains his ability to speak before Derek can open his own mouth. “I know there are the photos, and I’m glad Dad gave those to me when he found them, but I can’t accept the Leia figurine, it’s… not when you had it before.”

There’s a beat, and then Stiles’ face blanches. 

“Shit,” he says, “you weren’t supposed to know…”

“You gave me these?” Derek asks, his mind finally working enough for him to speak. 

Stiles nods, still a little pale, but there’s a shade of pink tinting his cheeks that makes Derek’s mind reel a little. He puts the photos back in the box, sets it down on the couch, and then he jumps over the back, landing in front of Stiles. 

“I wanted to give you the Leia years ago,” Derek admits after a while of them standing there in silence. “I… it was in the vault, and when I found it, I couldn’t think of anyone else but you. I just didn’t know how to, without also telling you…”

He doesn’t get to finish the sentence, because his words get cut off by Stiles’ lips. It’s a short kiss, and it’s hesitant a little, like Stiles is still unsure if it’s the right thing to do. Derek is about to kiss back when Stiles pulls away and glances above their heads. 

“Mistletoe,” he whispers, and Derek follows his gaze to find a plastic bundle that vaguely resembles the deadly plant. 

“Just mistletoe?” Derek asks, dropping his eyes back to Stiles’ face. 

A beat and a shake of Stiles’ head later, Derek is stepping closer and returning the kiss. 

**Author's Note:**

>   
> [fic post on tumblr](http://triggeringthehealing.tumblr.com/post/136042224414/underneath-the-wrapping-sterek-g-ao3-23k) | [my fic blog](http://triggeringthehealing.tumblr.com/) | [my blog](http://froggydarren.tumblr.com/)  
> 


End file.
